Some wounds go so deep that you don't even feel them until months, maybe years, later.

The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

Books, and especially fiction, do not proceed from ideas. They are born from feelings

Silence was not the absence of sound but was itself a sound that could be loud or soft, soothing or disturbing, complex or simple.

I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see that our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details.

Each of us is comprised of stories, stories not only about ourselves but stories about ancestors we never knew and people we've never met. We have stories we love to tell and stories we have never told anyone. The extent to which others know us is determined by the stories we choose to share. We extend a deep trust to someone when we say, "I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone." Sharing stories creates trust because through stories we come to a recognition of how much we have in common.

The young accept the extraordinary as normal because they do not compare their lives with those of others when everyone is like them.